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Today is Veteran’s Day, a day of commemoration whose meaning and import are well beyond the moanings of any single idiot on his blog. It’s a day we pin poppies to shirts, dwell fondly on thoughts of heroes and heroism and, if you’re an actual veteran, harass local restaurants for free food. It’s a day we wave flags at conflicted individuals strapped to parade floats built in their honor, whether or not they feel particularly honorable. It’s a day we thank random strangers we know nothing about for fighting for our freedom, even though the only serious threats to American freedom in the last half century have come from government security initiatives and American voters hungering for an imbecile king.

It’s a day of profound and ambivalence for me personally, a Marine Corps veteran of five years on active duty lacking not only combat experience but any deployment experience at all. I’m aware of the consolations offered to individuals such as myself: “Hey, at least you volunteered, and that’s more than 99% of America can say.” “Your job was important, too.” “Be glad. People don’t come back the same.” Well, yes. Sure. The lattermost is something for which one must feel at least some gratitude. But one doesn’t volunteer for the military with the aim of coming out the other side unchanged. We join because we feel an obligation. To show up as a tool for war and then be stowed in a broom closet for a few years does not leave you with any sense of moral or ethical satisfaction.

Granted, enlisted Marines don’t have much say in the matter. When I signed up to be a cryptologic linguist, the recruiter, a buck-toothed Texan hick with a beer gut and a greasy smile, assured me my job would be on the ground with infantry, running around with a radio on my back and shouting at people in Arabic. I arrived at my duty station two years later as a Farsi translator and assigned a desk in an air-conditioned building with a cafe. Never trust a recruiter. Despite practically begging for a deployment for a year, I only ever heard, “Get back to work and wait your turn.”

The prospects of any deployment were slim, even after I was retrained in Pashto. By that point I’d developed a repetitive strain injury in my shoulders, thanks to a “Type II sub-acromion”—a little nub that sticks out of my shoulder bones and digs into my bicep muscles when performing certain overhead exercises. Pullups, mainly. If you know anything about Marine Corps fitness, you know pullups are the essential benchmark of, well, everything. It was a long and frustrating process to track down the cause of my injury, and not only from a medical mystery standpoint. It was a constant embarrassment and source of shame that performing pullups injured me. I was never a stellar Marine fitness-wise, but this made me a walking joke. Always injured, never deployed, not deployable. I was at best a half-Marine.

On top of that, my constant absence from work to track down the shoulder issue meant I didn’t develop well in my new Pashto duties. I never attained the confident proficiency I had in my Farsi. Pashto is, admittedly, a far more difficult language than Farsi, and our targets and mission presented all sorts of additional challenges, but these are obstacles that could be overcome with persistence and experience. I’d have to be at work regularly for that, though.

Two events made this all the worse. The first was when our battalion commander, a Marine colonel, toured the building where we worked. I gave him an ad-hoc presentation a day after I was told he would not come to our particular corner. He then went to see the other Marine Pashto linguists, and he told them their work was important and mine was not. What a motivator.

The second incident was when the agency we worked under requested I deploy for one of their missions. I’m not exaggerating when I say this was actual spy work. No uniform. Civilian clothing. Doing top secret level work undercover on the other side of the world in a country where a particular flavor of local would be delighted to slice off my head. This is the sort of thing boys dream about, and they had asked me to do it. I didn’t even need to have functioning shoulders to do it.

But, of course, the Marine Corps denied their request. They had to. I was non-deployable in their eyes. I don’t blame them for it. But the moment I was told “No” was the lowest moment of my Marine Corps career, and it remains the most emblematic. No deployment. No real service of note. Just physical weakness and mediocre work as a linguist.

And that brings us to Veteran’s Day, a day that, presumably, includes some sort of celebration of me. I don’t feel celebration-worthy. I don’t feel celebratory. It’s a day when the unquestioned valour and determination of men and women in the worst of circumstances is shown on loop on every television screen and every news page. It’s a day when I’m lumped in with these men and women, a day of good intentions but profound mistaken identity.

It’s an annual reminder of my failure to do what I set out to do, a day of confusion and shame and regret and frustration. I wanted to become part of some grand, noble narrative. My story lacks any nobility or heroism. It is only weakness and inflammation and mediocrity—where it is not outright failure.

But maybe that’s what Veteran’s Day is. It’s the day we commemorate the end of the war to end all wars on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Fat lot of good that did. O Willie McBride, it all happened again, and again and again and again and again. It’s a day we commemorate the failure of military as a tonic for the ills of mankind, a day we pause to remember the sacrificial victims generation after generation society hurls fruitlessly into the volcano to appease their insatiable gods. That is the only light in which “fighting for our freedom” makes any sense. There are no hordes at the gates coming to take away our constitutional freedoms. We give those away to our own homegrown tyrants rather happily. To fight for freedom is throw one’s body on the sacrificial pyre as an appeasement to ravenous spirits. I have done that. I have hurled my body, frail and useless as it is, on the pyre. I am failed kindling perhaps, but kindling I volunteered to be.

This morning I took my daughters to the library for the story time program. As I was unpacking them from the van, the maintenance man who’d been cleaning windows when we pulled in approached and began to tell me how important was to read to children. He told me he read to his son every day, even in the womb.

He then turned to walk away. “The most interesting thing I read to him,” he said, returning to his work, “was a book called Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”

Ah! Another thing. God of War is not only only one of thirty billion examples of the death of a woman being the starting point of a male character’s narrative, it’s the second time in this very series it’s been a wife of Kratos. Two different women! Granted, this time around the dead doll ain’t a pretext for a revenge story, but the trope’s scaffolding remains: Snuff a lady out and send the boys on an adventure.

Feminists in gaming have continuously pointed this trope out over the years, generally to the fury of male fans. They have a point. The argument is that this is a sign the industry is dominated by men. I agree with this; it is both true in a obvious sense that the industry is largely populated by men, and they are making stories from the male point of view.

However, the next part of the argument is that this trope is a sign the industry is filled with misogyny. Here they only nearly have a point. While the industry is undeniably a putrid cesspool of man-children who view women as disposable objects (the last few years have made this obvious to anyone but the most dimwitted), that is not necessarily the reason the trope is pervasive or even extant at all.

Okay, maybe it is half the time. Or most of the time. But not all the time!

Again, I agree this is a sign of a male-dominated industry. But this trope isn’t particular to men who despise and/or are terrified of women; in fact, it plays very closely on a deep-seated male fear: to lose a wife, girlfriend, daughter, etc, is an ultimate nightmare for many (any?) of us. Impolitic as it is to say, zealous defense of our beloved females is something deeply rooted in all of us, and is as natural as, say, an orientation. It is primal. it is what keeps us awake at night in the dark, quiet hours. It is what causes us to glower and glare and flex our muscles at the most absurd of times.

Perhaps we never grow out of being little boys afraid of losing their mothers. I don’t know what it is. But fear of losing a woman close to us, someone we are willing to give everything for, someone whose pain and suffering we would bear in their stead if we only could, whose love and being gives us our own being, is primordial. It is an unmodern idea, and therefore unorthodox in the Holy Church of Now, but it is a human one, and for that reason is it unshakeable.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been pecking away at one of this year’s mega monolithic greatest-of-all time contenders, the sequel/soft reboot God of War. It is a sumptuous visual repast; I have grown fat and sluggish indulging on its richly textured take on a mythical Norway of Ye Olde Mythological Times. The resolutions are high. The surfaces, glinting. The pixels, many. The main menu screen–looking all the world for an up-rezzed PR bullshot of a snowy wood–breaks away into the player’s control immediately, declaring, “Yes, this is how the game really looks, and yes, it is purdy.” We’ve come a long way in visual design.

Interaction design, perhaps not so much. From the very outset, this is a game about stoically burying your magic axe into things to solve problems. Kratos, the eponymous Deity of Destruction chops a tree under the direction of the player. Harken, ye: The axe is life, the axe is love. The axe is for chopping trees. The axe is for chopping wolves. The axe is for chopping the nasty undead. The axe is for chopping the nasty not-dead-yet. The axe is for chopping puzzles. The axe heals all wounds, mends all tears.

The axe is everything because violence is everything. It is the fundamental grammar of the medium. As sentences and paragraphs make up literature and scenes make up film, violence is the essential component of videogames–whether it is present or not. Take a look at any list of the “greatest” videogames of all time, and you’ll find a definite pattern. Each one is, in form and content, in poeima and logos, violence. And even if there does happen to be a game on the list in which violence is not the primary mode of player praxis, it will nevertheless be defined by violence in some way: either by its looming threat to annihilate the player, the background on which a story is set, and even its controversial decision not to allow the player to engage in violence (a thing that causes many gamers to deny that it is a game at all).

There are no other stories to be told in games or by games. Or, rather, that is an genuine position one could hold without naivete of the genre.

There are exceptions, obviously. There are visual novels, for example. But these are little more than choose-your-own adventure comic books developed for screens so readers can experience the pleasures of mediocre voice work and eye-eating blue light. They’re also largely and laughably pornographic, and there is a comically sad firestorm every time a localization team decides to tone down the sexualized depiction of teenagers that is so rife in this Japanese-dominated genre. They are, then, not only adapted mutations of another medium, but products that exchange one target appetite for another. But what about Candy Crush, you say? To that I can only ask, do you not hear the anguished cries of Willie Wonka?

There is putatively a great narrative to God of War. Kratos, our Suzerain of Sacking, has lost another wife to that inexorable rascal called mortality and so sets off with his son to fulfill his wife’s final wish: to scatter her ashes on a very tall mountaintop. (Believe it or not, this is not the first game where Kratos is motivated by the death of his spouse.) It’s even very snazzy: the visuals, again, are lovely. The voice-acting is pretty good, and much of the dialogue between father and son is well-written. The camera never cuts away (save at player death), making for a continuous intimate shot of, uh, Kratos’ enormous, leather-clad lats as he cleaves his way through mountains of monsters and bandits. (Videogame makers often have no idea what to do with their cameras, as if ignorant of a century-old art dedicated to that very thing, and even lauded titles like The Last of Us suffer from dull, perfunctory camerawork, so this is a notable development.) There is tasty coating of story here, a tale of struggling to be a father, of dealing with grief.

But it is only a coating. This is a game about violence. This game is violence. The bulk of the player’s time is spent axing things. That is what the player is empowered to do. The development of Kratos’ relationship with his son is epiphenomenal; it happens incidentally to the murder sprees. It is window-dressing to the real story, which is the player’s Sisyphean task of chopping infinite enemy hordes to bits, and the filling of experience bars and navigating of menus that empower it all.

And that is dull, so very dull. I called it quits ten hours in. I left the Chief of Chopping and his kind-hearted-but-still-murderous son somewhere in what I assume to be the Mines of Moria. Yes, this game is called God of War–what else should I expect? A good point–but I am already God of War. I have been for many years now, in every game I play. I am the vengeful divine, boiling with Old Testament wrath. It is the only thing I know how to be in games. It is all that they let me be. They sell me beautiful worlds to fill with blood. I dutifully trod the winepress.

Hey. Now that’s an idea. God of Wine. That’s what I really want. No, not the Third Eye Blind song. I want a triple-A blockbuster videogame with incredible visual and audio work about a minor deity of viticulture who embarks on an epic journey with his progeny to sample the fruit of the paradisal terroir of various wine regions in the Mediterranean. No killing. Just sailing, ambling, eating, drinking. Perhaps some good reading. We needn’t even kill the wife to have any narrative motivation! She can come along, too.

Ah, but only if. No, we must murder. You know the saying: When in Rome—or Greece—or Norway—kill everything in sight. The gods of videogame design demand it.

And it looks atrocious. There is no style here. How could I ever ask a guest to stay? What a perfectly horrible host I am! Please, sit. I’ll go make tea. Do you mind Lapsang Souchong? Oh, you’ve never had it? Imagine instead of a nice cup of tea, someone poured hot water over a burnt log and served you that.

Welcome to the new site. It’s very old again. Together—if we try hard enough—we might be just obsolete enough to become useful.

I’ve attached a woodcut from The Pilgrim’s Progress. No reason. Don’t think about it.